As we were building the NATS Java client we realized we wanted code to run the client through its paces. We built unit tests, example code and added basic functionality to our existing benchmarking tool. As we talked to prospective users, they were asking for benchmarks across the variety of different ways we can publish and subscribe. For instance see publishing synchronous versus asynchronous. Push versus pull consuming. Different amounts of threading with shared or individual connections to the server. Read more...

Publish-Subscribe with NATS CLI Previously we introduced the New NATS CLI , today we look at the Publish-Subscribe pattern using the CLI. Links to related documentation: Subjects-Based Messaging Publish-Subscribe Queue Subscriptions Request-Reply The NATS CLI About the Author R.I. Pienaar is a long-time NATS Maintainer and a senior member of the engineering team at Synadia Communications . Read more...

Hello World with the NATS Java Library Recently, stream functionality was added to the NATS server in release 2.2. See our JetStream section in docs for additional information. Check out this video where I discuss the basics of how to create a stream and then publish and consume messages using the NATS Java client . The full source of the project can be found here: https://github.com/nats-io/java-nats-examples/tree/main/hello-world About the Author Scott Fauerbach is a member of the engineering team at Synadia Communications . Read more...

The previous entry in this series showed us how to create a stream. Once you have defined a stream, you can publish to the configured subjects. Publishing to stream subjects isn’t really much different from publishing a regular NatsMessage. Once a subject is established, you could publish a regular NatsMessage to that subject, but there are benefits to publishing via the JetStream API instead of the regular message API. Publish Acknowledgement When you publish via the JetStream API, each publish will receive an acknowledgement or PublishAck. Read more...

The NATS Java library with support for JetStream has just been released! JetStream allows you to persist streams of messages, allows consumers to either subscribe in real time or to access the messages at a later time with the added flexibility to choose from where in the stream you want to start receiving messages. You can start reading from the stream at a specific point in time or start at a specific message sequence number. Read more...

Introducing NATS CLI Historically NATS did not have a clear obvious place to go for a CLI tool, users had various example applications that had to build and run manually. These tools were primarily examples of using the APIs rather than full UX CLI experience. As part of the NATS 2.2.0 release that introduced JetStream and its administration needs, we took the opportunity to build a full CLI tool for users and administrators alike. Read more...

A few months ago, Header support was added to NATS Server. With the release of the 2.10.0 Java client , Headers are completely supported. NATS Headers are analogous to http request Headers and you can leverage them for the same type of things, for example, to pass information like security, request, transaction or state information. In Java terms, it’s analogous to a map of type Map<String, List<String>> In fact, that’s exactly what is used for the backing data structure in the Headers object. Read more...

Overview NATS 2.2 is the largest feature release since version 2.0. The 2.2 release provides highly scalable, highly performant, secure and easy-to-use next generation streaming in the form of JetStream, allows remote access via websockets, has simplified NATS account management, and provides native MQTT support built into the server. These features further enables NATS toward our goal of securely democratizing streams and services for the hyperconnected world we live in. Read more...

The NATS Server can make good use of TLS for securing various connections, including some modes where NATS servers talk directly to each other. When you configure the server to verify the certificate of a peer, you provide a path to a Certificate Authority bundle file, to act as a trust anchor. So far, so normal. In environments such as Kubernetes, it’s common for a certificate management process to create a Kubernetes secret, containing a key, a certificate, and a copy of the issuer’s certificate as ca. Read more...

Overview At Synadia we have the goal of unifying all cloud, edge, and IoT communications. We guide companies in their journey from where they are today toward efficiently operating a secure and resilient modern distributed communications system and leverage the NATS.io project to get them there. Derek Collison, creator of NATS, founded Synadia which stewards the NATS project. We see users deploy NATS in ways that fit into a few buckets - a single cluster k8s deployment, a cluster of NATS servers in the cloud, on VMs, or on bare metal. Read more...